Christian talker: ‘Marxist’ Lincoln enslaved us all by ending Southern slavery

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Religious right broadcaster Kevin Swanson agreed with one of his guests that Abraham Lincoln imposed socialism on the United States during the “war against the South” – more commonly known as the Civil War.

Swanson hosted neo-Confederate author Walter Kennedy last month on his radio program, reported Right Wing Watch, where the pair argued the Republican Party had been founded by “radical socialists and communists.”

“The Democrats, both Northern and Southerners, believed in limited government, and the Marxists hated that concept,” Kennedy said. “They wanted to do away with states’ rights and limited government so that they’d have one big all-powerful indivisible government that could force its will upon the American people.”

The broadcaster – who has argued the Disney hit movie “Frozen” was a satanic tool for indoctrinating girls to become lesbians — agreed with his guest, saying Lincoln and Mark Twain helped ruin the U.S. by replacing Southern slavery with socialist slavery.

“It’s the socialist utopians that come into town and they promise deliverance from local fiefdoms, only to create a large tyranny in the Soviet Union, Soviet America and Soviet China and Soviet everywhere else in the world,” Swanson said.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/11/christian-talker-marxist-lincoln-enslaved-us-all-by-ending-southern-slavery/

[tkmorris]

1. Now someone say "He's not a REAL Christian"

I'm putting my money on post 7.

[Dawson Leery]

2. Remember, the American evangelical movement has it's origins

in the southern church. The Baptists of the south were pro-slavery, while the northern ones opposed such an atrocity.

[YoungDemCA]

6. I think that that's partially true

But not entirely. There were (and are) plenty of churches in the Northern and Western US that would be considered "evangelical" or even "fundamentalist."

[Aristus]

3. So, every place that doesn't have slavery is 'Soviet', huh?

[Coventina]

4. Wow! He was a really early adopter!

[YoungDemCA]

5. Well...I appreciate his blunt honesty

No talking in code, nothing subtle about him, etc.

[NickB79]

7. Were there even Marxists in the 1860's? nt

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

8. Karl Marx was alive

But I don't believe he was leading any movement at the time.

[Coventina]

9. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848

so it's *possible*.

Like I said in my post, that makes Lincoln a *really* early adopter!!

[former9thward]

12. Well there was certainly Karl Marx himself.

Marx began writing for the New York Tribune in 1852. The Tribune was an influential abolitionist paper. But Lincoln was no Marxist. He was the ultimate capitalist who, through the civil war, got rid of the remaining feudal structure in the South.

[Starry Messenger]

16. Yes. Marx wrote about Lincoln's campaign and American Marxists helped in the election.

Marxist Joseph Weydemeyer commanded in the Union Army. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weydemeyer

http://williamzfoster.blogspot.com/2013/01/chapter-three-marxists-in-struggle.html

"THE ELECTION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The election in 1860 was the hardest fought in the history of the United States up to that time. The Republican Party made an all-out and successful effort to win the decisive support of the great masses of armers, workers, immigrants, and free Negroes, who were all part of the great new coalition under the leadership of the northern bourgeoisie. Philip S. Foner states that "It is not an exaggeration to say that the Republican Party fought its way to victory in the campaign of 1860 "the party of free labor."8

Lincoln was a very popular candidate among the toiling masses. He was known to be an enemy of slavery; his many pro-labor expressions had won him a wide following among the workers; his advocacy of the Homestead bill had secured him backing among the farmers of the North and West; and his fight against bigoted native "know-nothingism" had entrenched him generally among the foreign-born. He faced three opposing presidential candidates—Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell—representing the three-way split in the Democratic Party, and all supporting slavery in one way or another. Lincoln stood on a platform of "containing slavery" to its existing areas. There was no candidate pledged for outright abolition.

In the bitterly fought election the slavocrats, who also had many contacts and supporters in the North, denounced Lincoln with every slander that their fertile minds could concoct. The redbaiters of the time shouted against "Black Republicanism" and "Red Republicanism." Pro-slavery employers and newspapers tried to intimidate the workers by threatening them with discharge, by menacing them with a prospect of economic crisis, and by warning them that Negro emancipation would create a flood of cheap labor which would ruin wage rates. At the same time, the reactionaries tried to split the young Republican Party by cultivating "know-nothing" anti-foreign movements inside its ranks.

The Marxists were very active in this vital election struggle. The clarity of their anti-slavery stand and their militant spirit made up for their still very small numbers. Their key positions in many trade unions enabled them to be a real factor in mobilizing the workers behind Lincoln's candidacy. To this end they spared no effort, holding election meetings of workers in many parts of the North and East. Undoubtedly, the labor vote swung the election for Lincoln, and for this the Marxists were entitled to no small share of the credit.

The Marxists were energetic in winning the decisive foreign-born masses to support Lincoln. In 1860 the foreign-born made up 47.62 percent of the population of New York, 50 percent of Chicago and Pittsburgh, and 59.66 percent of St. Louis, with other cities in proportion. The Germans, by far the largest immigrant group in the country, were a powerful force in Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. They heavily backed Lincoln. "Of the 87 German language newspapers, 69 were for Lincoln."9"

Of course, it isn't true that they were trying to do what the right wing nuts accuse them of, but they deserve their credit and place in US History.

[Enrique]

10. in a way he's right

not that Lincoln was a a Communist, but the Civil War had a lot to do with class struggle.

If you listen to RWers talk about socialism and capitalism in absolutist terms like you hear on the radio, there is no doubt what side they would fall on in the Civil War. This guy is just being honest.

[Rex]

11. It is amazing, personally to me, how such idiots can get a gig and airtime.

Actually, over the years, I now see how even the biggest dullard can get airtime. They appeal to stupid, weak willed, morans that are racist, bigoted and hypocritical.

So let me see if I understand correctly - America would be BETTER OFF with slavery...because we've turned into the USSA? Do they even begin to realize that the reason we are all wage slaves is because of PRIVATE business and not some social agency?

Pathetic.

[shenmue]

13. Jesus, Mary and Joseph

Whah?

[Enrique]

14. Marx's letter to Lincoln, congratulating him after the 1864 election

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

[Maedhros]

15. That Marx fellow - he was onto something...[n/t]